SpaceX’s Starship rocket reaches orbit for the first time
SpaceX’s Starship rocket reached Earth orbit for the first time, though not without some drama along the way.
The company’s mega-rocket launched into space from South Texas early Monday morning and ticked all the early checkboxes for a successful takeoff. But shortly after the upper stage of the Ship separated, it lost one of its six Raptor engines.
While Starship could still reach orbit if it loses an engine, the company initially called off the attempt, only to decide to keep pushing just a few minutes later.
Reaching orbit is a critical milestone that could let SpaceX start using Starship for regular commercial missions, and, importantly, inch closer to its goal of making the mega-rocket fully reusable. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is orienting the entire company around Starship, which has become central to the company’s plans to operate moon missions for NASA, and far-out ideas like putting data center satellites in orbit.
Prior to the launch, SpaceX had planned to have the Starship upper stage orbit the Earth six times over nine hours while deploying 26 third-generation Starlinks into the satellite company’s constellation of internet satellites. It’s not immediately clear if any of that plan was changed due to the delayed entry into Earth orbit.
The company was also able to make progress on returning the Super Heavy booster stage of the rocket back to the launchpad. After separating from the upper stage of Starship a few minutes into the flight, the booster returned to the Gulf coast and performed a simulated landing over the water. It was the cleanest simulated landing SpaceX has performed with the V3 version of Starship, which it started testing in May.
This story is developing…
Topics
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.